all-access pass —

Ars readers now have access to any Nature papers we cover

Anyone can now read the paper and tell us just how wrong our coverage is.

Whenever the science news we cover is based on a publication, we do our best to provide readers with a link to the paper itself at the bottom of the report. What we can't do, however, is guarantee that you'll be able to do anything with that link. In most cases, journals charge for access to the full paper, which typically means that if you're not at a library or on a campus, you probably won't be able to look over the details of the research involved.

Open access journals such as PeerJ and PLoS don't suffer from this problem, but they publish a small fraction of the full total of papers out there. As a result, the phrase "I don't have access to the paper..." occurs pretty often in our comment discussions.

Further Reading

Late last year, Nature Publishing Group announced that it would be providing a limited form of access (no saving, no printing) to its journals, which include Nature itself and more specialized journals such as Nature Physics and Nature Geoscience. Any link to a paper in one of a handful of news outlets would bring the reader to the full text of the paper.

At the time, Ars Technica wasn't one of the included news outlets, but that has now changed. Readers will now be directed to the full text of the paper from any links on our site. We'd like to thank Nature Publishing for arranging this feature. And while this still leaves a lot of publications behind paywalls, hopefully we'll see "I don't have access to the paper..." a bit less often.

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